


burning the skies

by cave_canem



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - How to Train Your Dragon Fusion, Dragons, Fantasy Vikings, Gen, Pre-Relationship, Yule, absolutely 0 ambition of being even remotely historically accurate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:20:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21834328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cave_canem/pseuds/cave_canem
Summary: After a dragon raid on the neighboring island of Ravennest, Neil witnesses the crash of a dragon on Foxhole Island. Going to investigate might turn out to be the biggest decision he's ever made.Or, the HTTYD AU literally no one ever asked for, ft Dan as a stressed holiday organizer and Andrew the blacksmith. Also, dragons.
Relationships: Kevin Day & Neil Josten, Neil Josten & Andrew Minyard
Comments: 17
Kudos: 112
Collections: AFTG Exchange, AFTG Exchange Winter 2019





	burning the skies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AokazuSei](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AokazuSei/gifts).



> This is my (belated! Sorry!) gift to aokazusei for the 2019 aftg winter exchange. Thank you to the mods of the exchange for organizing it once again! You're all the foundation of the fandom. 
> 
> The prompt for this fic was for anything fantasy or magic, so I jumped on my laptop and wrote... not that. Sorry. You did mention several fics that you liked that featured dragons, and this was born from that! 
> 
> Happy reading to all.

It’s because he’s up on the roof of his house that Neil sees the dragon go down.

It’s one of those clear evenings, toward the beginning of winter; the sky is spotted with stars and the sea crashes ahead on the steep cliffs where the village is nested. A few hours ago, the first signs of a fire appeared on the horizon, small dots of fire red glowing ahead on one of the lands across from Foxhole Island.

Ravennest is only visible from the Foxhole on clear nights like this one; most of the time, it’s well hidden from view by a layer of thick fog which seems to permeate the air of the island at least ten months out of twelve. Considering the unfriendly terms the two villages are on, it’s probably for the best.

As soon as the fires are spotted, chief of clan David Wymack sends a boat to the lighthouse rock, a few hours ahead in the direction of Ravennest. Neil doesn’t take part in the expedition; he has no love or consideration for the Ravens and no other motivation to help them.

He sneaks back home after a communal meal in the Great Hall, leaving behind the rest of the Foxes to watch the boats disappear from view on the dark sea and the fires grow on the horizon from the highest point of the island.

Kevin in particular, who grew up on Ravennest before Wymack offered him a home on Foxhole Island, stands white-knuckled at the rail of the lookout terrace built in front of the mess.

No one sees Neil leave except Andrew, sitting cross-legged on the railing next to Kevin. He’s leaning back against a pillar larger than he is, almost turning his back to the spectacle at sea. Neil meets his eyes as he starts down on the high staircase snaking back down to the village; he doesn’t think any news of his absence will come from Andrew.

Neil has done his very best to interact as little as possible with the Foxes since his mother moved them here from Ravennest, almost ten years ago, but there is no ignoring Andrew Minyard.

For one thing, the population of Foxhole Island is small enough that there is only a limited amount of people Neil’s age in the village. He might have obeyed his mother’s orders before her death and kept away, but he couldn’t escape forever the dozen or so other teenagers he was constantly grouped with.

Fortunately, Andrew always seemed as reticent to interact with others as Neil was, and so they’ve entered adulthood without really correcting that situation.

So Neil, three years after his mother’s death, is able to shrug off the heavy weight of Andrew’s gaze. He goes back to his house on the outskirts of the village without feeling the reluctant concern of the other Foxes, kindles the fire back to life and climbs on the narrow edge of his roof.

All houses around Foxhole Island are adorned with animal-shaped finials; dragons and foxes are the most popular, in enough different shapes and colors to give Neil a mild headache on a good day. Neil’s is merely a block of wood, useless as decoration but comfortable enough for him to sit on.

He bundles up in a blanket, drawing his knees close to his chest, and waits.

The Foxes’ boat reaches the lighthouse; Neil knows this, in spite of the dark night, because the beacon tower suddenly lights up.

The Raven tower does not. For the rest of the night, only silence and dark answers the Foxes’ offer of help.

Dawn is breaking when Neil loses sight of the fires against the paling sky on the horizon. The sun warms his back, but he’s so cold that he can hardly feel his fingers, knotted in the thick blanket thrown around his shoulders.

It’s over. The beacons never lit up; proud Ravennest declined all help.

Neil allows his burning eyes to close for a second. He breathes in deeply, trying to will his brain to rest for the all-nighter in a handful of seconds. It would be inconvenient to fall asleep on top of his house, out of all places, and risk falling over.

He opens his eyes, blinking hard. He’s squinting in the low light, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. That’s when he sees it, a blurry dot growing bigger by the second, racing in the sky. It’s almost invisible in the still gray sky, but there’s no mistaking it as it draws closer to Foxhole.

A dragon.

Neil stands up quickly, not bothering to draw the blanket aside. It tangles up in his feet in his haste and he almost tips over, losing sight of the ever-growing dragon shape.

He finds it again a second later, much closer to the shore than he thought it would be. It’s a speedy dragon; most of them would have taken at least another quarter of an hour to cover such distances.

He follows down the trajectory of the dragon, all the way from the cloud cover. His cover’s slipped, but Neil can’t be bothered by the chill of dawn. His heart is beating in his chest like it’s trying to escape up his throat.

A dragon, so close to Foxhole Island, where no one’s sighted one in decades. A dragon, so close to the food stocks. A dragon, after all this time—

The dragon is diving straight for the pine forest extending on the northern tip of the island. It keeps diving, spiralling slightly on itself, when Neil thought it should slow down. At the very last moment, its shape wavers slightly; it’s unfurled its wings. It disappears out of view under the canopy; Neil thinks he can see the top of the trees shake with the disruption. A cloud of birds flies off.

Neil is clambering down to the ground before he realizes he’s moved. There’s a dragon on the island, his brain tells him. Less than three miles away, live and breathing—and probably hurt, if the way it landed is any indication.

Neil’s stomach is still rolling. He jumps down on the attic loft, closing the roof hatch behind himself. His numbed feet hit the planks with a dull sound, sensations stinging their way up his legs. He grits his teeth and carefully steps down the stairs down to the main floor.

The fire is out, but it warmed the house comfortably. Neil grabs water from a bucket nearby, relieved to find it cold but not icy, and washes perfunctorily.

Like many others in the village, Mary and Neil built their houses from scratch. It’s a situation they were well acquainted with already: Ravennest, like many other human settlements around this corner of the world, has been subject to dragon raids for decades. Houses are always being built and rebuilt.

New houses used to pop up frequently on Foxhole, although they haven’t in the past few years. Most inhabitants of the island weren’t born there; Foxhole welcomes travelers and refugees without discrimination. Neil and Mary were among one of the latest waves of arrivals, blending in easily even if they were coming straight from the island’s biggest rival clan.

Because of this, it wasn’t very curious that Mary decided to build a small house, one that would make it uncomfortable if not impossible to raise several generations in. Neil knows they weren’t supposed to stay, at first.

Neil hasn’t touched the plan of the house since Mary’s death. He’s had to fix the roof a few times and accepted help replacing some of the brittlest walls to make the building into a sturdier house, but he hasn’t seen the need to expand it. It’s always going to be just him inside. He’s always known he was not staying, anyways.

And now—now a dragon.

Dragons are wild creatures. They’re smart and deadly, and have waged war against humans for generations. Casualties are counted in each group, but what dragons truly seek is food, which at the beginning of winter can have disastrous consequences on villages.

For some reason, dragons have never ventured as far south as Foxhole island. A lot of them are built for rougher weather, and Foxhole is isolated enough that it doesn’t hold much interest for creatures who have easy access to the wilder islands east of there.

The rumor is that raids have abated in the past few decades. These days, according to the people Foxhole island attracts, dragons are considered dangerous the same way wild boars or bears are: a reason to be careful, but not inclined to attack if handled carefully.

Ravennest, however, has always known dragon attacks. Neil was born there; as long as he can remember, the emergency horn has always been blown without warning in the middle of the night. Manning war machines was a skill he had been expected to develop early as a child. From the sky came the greatest danger: overhead was never safe, and fire was the worst of all.

Neil undresses quickly, shedding his clothes, wet from the night, over the back of a chair. He inches closer to the fire while he spreads a thick and odorous paste on his body. His torso, arms and face are a mess of scar tissue and ruined skin that pulls and itches when he doesn’t moisturize it. Compared to others on Ravennest, he got off easy.

He still attracts stares on Foxhole, so he always takes care to cover himself from neck to toe. Abby, the village’s healer, has taken to provide him with a paste that soothe his skin. It smells good, too, even if Neil isn’t sure what is in it. He takes care to close the pot and put it back where he always puts it away.

His thick clothes are a comfort against his skin. The blast of cold doesn’t even bother him when he steps back outside and starts down the street. It’s just after dawn; people who stayed up all night anxiously watching the lights of Ravennest are just coming back home.

Neil draws up his hood, to protect himself from the cold just as much as from the stares. He nods back at people when they acknowledge him in the shadows of the quiet houses, and keeps his pace brisk.

“Neil!” a voice calls out just as he’s crossing in front of the blacksmith’s shop.

Neil’s steps falters against his wish. Too late to pretend he hasn’t heard—the voice is clear and assertive.

“Dan,” he greets when the chief’s daughter catches up with him. “What are you up to?”

The question derails her from her own, just as Neil knew it would.

“Yule preparations,” Dan says. “I’m rounding up teams for building the decorative frames. Closer to the date we’ll also have to gather the trees and holly for the crowns—”

“Already? It’s almost in a month.”

“Ugh, not you too.” Dan throws her head back. “I swear everyone’s saying the same thing, but I know how it’s going to be—people rushing at the last minute for the banquet, the arches not built until the evening before, bloody fingers from weaving all that holly. You see what I mean.”

“There’s a simple solution to that,” Neil says, amused in spite of himself.

Dan gives him a look. She knows his stance on celebrations in general and social ones in particular. “Yes,” she stresses. “Organization. In advance.”

“Sure.”

“Anyway. Any preference?”

It’s only then that Neil notices the pad and pen she’s holding. If she’s at the step of making lists, she’s really serious about it.

“Not really,” he shrugs. “Sign me up for whatever’s left.”

“You’re going to end up with children’s supervision with that mindset.”

“Whatever’s left that isn’t to do with children,” Neil amends. “Don’t worry about me.”

“I won’t,” Dan assures him. “You’re so independent and aloof, after all.”

She winks at him, a reassurance that she’s joking. Neil is spared having to answer and finding an excuse to leave when she raises her head, glancing over his shoulder.

“Oh, Minyard!”

Neil tenses. There are technically two Minyards in town, but only one Dan would call that.

Andrew is leaning against the open counter of the blacksmith booth. He would be hidden in the shadows if his pale hair didn’t stand out so much; as it is, it’s impossible for Neil’s gaze not to zone in on Andrew’s face.

“Yule preparations,” Dan says, advancing toward the booth. Andrew draws back slightly. “Which team should I put you on?”

“None of them,” Andrew replies. The shutter of the booth slams shut in Dan’s face. Neil can hear Andrew moving around the smithy, scraping wood against the floor and messing with noisy metal.

“You little—” Dan splutters, still facing the shutter. A long creak makes her wince, like a lever that hasn’t been oiled in a long time. “Hey, dickhead, I was talking to you.”

“I think _he_ was done talking to _you_ ,” Neil tells her.

Dan waves him aside. “The door is open, jerk,” she calls, rounding the building for the side entrance. “For once in your life, would it kill you to show a modicum of team spirit toward the village that’s housed you for years?”

A loud clang interrupts her. Neil has a feeling Andrew is shuffling things around louder than usual to drown Dan out. He won’t resist too long, because she’s right and he cannot, but he will make his displeasure shown.

Neil leaves Dan to deal with the Andrew-shaped storm and steals away while she’s distracted.

* * *

The sun is high in the sky by the time Neil makes it to the part of the woods where he believes the dragon fell. There’s no telling for sure, because what seemed like a narrow point from afar turns out to be almost a mile wide, but Neil is hopeful nonetheless.

A dragon, especially one without control of its fall, is hard to miss. It leaves tracks. Neil is good with tracks, covering up his own or following those left by others.

The trees in this part of the woods stand tall and thick, covering the gray sky until Neil is left almost squinting in the low winter light. He's walking full north, toward the outward-most point of the island; then he can come back to the village following the western shore. It won't solve the matter of finding the dragon miraculously, but he thinks he saw it go down close to the shore, and there are tall cliffs on this side of the island: it can only have landed among the trees.

Sighing, Neil turns left, making his way through the undergrowth. Snow-covered brambles dig into the fabric of his pants, scratching at his jacket. Pine needles swat at his hair. He takes a second to untangle himself, wondering why he's doing this. Maybe the dragon is dead. Maybe it's hurt beyond help, or maybe it just had a snore and it's already gone back. Maybe someone else will have found it when Neil comes back empty-handed. Maybe—

A sound interrupts his thoughts, a sort of deep rumbling noise that definitely doesn't belong to the forest animals.

Neil walks forward, mindful of his step. Gravel rolls under a large weight farther ahead, followed by the sound of something scraping against wood and stone.

The ground under Neil's feet suddenly opens up and he almost falls down in a large ditch, a deep scar in the dark soil like someone took a giant cleaver down. Torn-off branches litter the path, others hanging from trees like broken bones. The snow was violently disturbed, baring the frozen ground.

Neil takes a deep breath. The dragon is grunting a few steps away from him, in what Neil guesses is a cove down a small cliff, blocked from view by boulders as tall as a man and the natural indentation of the ground. There's barely enough for him to sneak in between, but he manages, hoisting himself up until he can clamber over the spot where the boulders meet, covered in snow and untouched by anyone in years—until now.

A fallen tree a few steps away from Neil tells him that the dragon fell right down in the cove after its uncontrolled landing. It's pretty clear why, when Neil can finally lay his eyes on it: it's hurt.

It's a majestic creature, slick and black. Its skin is matte, which surprises Neil but shouldn't—how unpractical would it be for an animal built for stealth to glitter in the sunlight? It's also smaller than Neil thought it would be, not a long as a Monstrous Nightmare or even as wide as a Windgnasher.

The dragon lunges upward, tired of its movements on the ground. Its wings unfurl, slapping furiously for strength, and it lifts itself off the ground with a powerful jump. Neil looks on, barely daring to breathe, unaware of anything but the dragon in front of him.

It's not the first time he's been in presence of a dragon, or even the closest he's ever been to one. But he’s played the memory over and over in his head enough time now that it’s started to lose some of its realism, and seeing this one so close and so clearly in the daylight takes his breath away.

The dragon is flying, now. Neil didn’t think it could, but he watches with rapture as its powerful wings manage to hold it up in the air. The dragon rises again, six, seven feet over the ground, and then—

It falls down, left scrambling at the cliff for a hold. It touches the ground violently with a shrill and throaty cry that chills Neil to the bones.

He sees it when the dragon walks away, shaking its head to recoup and arranging its wings. He thought it would be a problem with the dragon’s tail, an inability to steer itself in the air, but the large wound extends on its left wing instead, on the bone where the scales look torn off.

The skin under them is red and bleeding, angry-looking even from afar. Neil holds back a wince. Dragons are usually immune to fire, for obvious reasons, but that comes from their scales and the inside of their mouths, not their skin itself. If one can manage to scrape a dragon’s scales off—a difficult feat in itself—then damage like this can be possible, given the right tools.

Human fire, Neil also knows, is different from dragon fire. A lot of the latter isn’t even real fire, although Neil is a little foggy on the particularities. Maybe he should ask Kevin, the village’s resident walking encyclopedia for anything related to dragons.

Neil would be too, if Mary hadn’t run from Ravennest when he was young. On Ravennest, dragon training really starts when children are about ten. Neil was slated to fight his first Gronckle in training the day after Mary took him under his arm and fled the island. He finds that he cannot blame her.

The Ravens are one of the last clans to keep up with the old dragon-slaying tradition, an aggressive stance that places them at odds with the dragon population. The whole island is locked in a vicious circle of violence, and Neil has had enough violence for the rest of his life. He still bears the scars of it.

The dragon is pacing, now, letting out half-cries of pain and frustration. It’s incredibly expressive, and something twists in Neil’s stomach at the sight of it. Seeing the wound on the dragon reminds him of his own scars inflicted by Ravens. He flexes his fingers, trying to resist the urge to rub his own scars. The skin pulls and pain sometime flares up down his arm. He shivers once.

The wound on its shoulder is not the only one the dragon sports, but it’s the most serious. When it extends its wings again, Neil sees that his previous thought was wrong: the dragon cannot actually unfurl its wings their full span. Its shoulder stops it halfway there, and it becomes clear very quickly that it can’t manage to pull itself off the ground long enough in this condition.

“It’s stuck,” Neil mutters, watching the dragon try and fail again.

The words have barely left his lips that Neil regrets them. He’s spoken low enough that he wouldn’t even be sure they were actually words if the dragon’s ears didn’t pivot immediately in his direction.

The dragon turns its head fully to the side. Its icy eyes find Neil—and stay there. Neil’s heart leaps up in his throat.

The snow crunches under the feet of the dragon as it stalks forward. Neil is hiding behind a tall boulder a few yards above the dragon’s head and should not be in its reach when it’s so wounded. He reconsiders his relative safety when he sees the dragon hop on a rock on the ground, gathering its strength on its haunches.

If it jumps, it might be able to sweep at Neil. With the spikes running down its spine, a well-placed hit of the tail would knock him out for good.

Slowly, slowly, Neil inches backward.

The dragon huffs, its warm breath curling in the icy air. Neil’s puff of air answers it almost comically before he realizes his mouth hangs open. He clamps his jaw shuts, ducks down behind the boulder, and starts full speed up the ditch left behind by the dragon.

A loud cry follows his retreat, covering the sound of his feet tripping through the snow.

* * *

He should let the dragon die.

Neil, realistically, knows this. His curiosity was sated when he went and confirmed for himself that the dragon _had_ fallen on the island. He should let the matter go and let the dragon fend for itself. Gods know dragons are not a helpless bunch, but a downed dragon is like any trapped creature, blind to logic and unpredictable. Neil’s help would amount to nothing but his own injuries, probably.

But a part of him can’t let the thought of the dragons in the snowy cove go. The image follows him through the woods, up the street and past the smithy all the way home. It slithers past the door when Neil closes it out on the dreary weather and buries itself deep in his bones when he stokes the fire.

The part of him that isn’t entirely Neil Josten—the part that answered to Nathaniel and, sometimes, Abram—cannot let the dragon out of his mind. Its sleek black form conjures up the sight of another, an older memory that Neil has done all he could to forget, on Mary’s orders.

The truth is, Mary and Nathaniel did not escape Ravennest on boat. Mary knew that Nathan would catch up with them—there was never a doubt that the right hand of the Ravens’ chief would let his wife and son go quietly. Clans politics meant that he would not be able to do a thing once Mary and Nathaniel reached Foxhole Island—but getting there would be the real trial.

So they didn’t get a boat. They sneaked out at night during a winter night, not unlike the one of the latest attack, and Mary dragged Nathaniel to the other side of the island, down on the shore in a hidden creek.

There was a dragon waiting there for them. Mary talked to it like it was human and capable of speech. Nathaniel stood behind her, ten and small for his age, and tried not to tear his eyes away from the large creature. He was sure the dragon was going to open its jaws and roast them on the spot, or swat at them with its large paws and sharp claws.

Instead it offered them its back and its wings.

“You have to keep it a secret, Neil,” Mary said later when they had landed on Foxhole Island after a few freezing hours spent in the thick cloud cover. “Forget about it.”

“Why did it do that?” Neil asked her, dodging the promise.

Mary seized his jaw and forced him to meet her eyes.

“He owed me a favor,” Mary said. “That’s your second lesson: don’t let people help you and tie you down. Always take care of your own problems. You don’t owe anything to anyone.”

“What’s lesson one?”

Mary squinted with annoyance. She let go of Neil’s face, her nails scratching shallowly at his cheek. “Forget dragons,” she said.

The next morning, Neil does everything that the voice inside that sounds like his mother tells him not to do, and packs a bag full of fish, a notebook and some ointment.

He leaves just after dawn, like the first time.

It takes him half as much time to make his way to the cove than the previous day. Thankfully Neil has an impeccable sense of direction, or he’d have gotten lost again. Snow fell during the night again, covering the tracks he left trudging through the forest.

The deep ditch has been partially filled with a layer of snow and the trees surrounding it barely look broken anymore, their gray branches bending down toward the ground under the weight of it. Neil stops at the foot of the boulder he climbed the day before, considering.

Neil’s boots are solid but ultimately not made for this kind of acrobatics, especially not while he’s carrying a bulky wicker basket on his back. The ground rises abruptly on his left, so he decides to walk the other way, looking for a path.

He finds it a few yards away, between the roots of a tree perched on the very edge of the overhang. He slithers down, keeping his hands close to the ground to catch himself when his feet slip. His thick mitts make it a difficult, rough task, and more than once he has to stop to catch his breath.

The fall isn’t that high, but rocks litter the ground where they fell from above and Neil has no desire to find himself trapped in a cove with an injured and frantic dragon.

He has to stop once the thought enter his head, looking up wildly. Everything is bathed in muted scales of gray, black and white. Neil must stand out like a sore thumb in the middle of the immobile landscape.

He holds his breath, exhaling only in the fur lining of his hood. Without the characteristic white breath in front of his face, it feels like he’s dead too, a part of the sterile environment.

No dragon.

Neil tries to squash down disappointment. It’s better that way, he tells himself. There’s nothing to lose by going on, even if the dragon’s flown away. For one, he’s sure it’s lost some scales due to its injury. Finding them would be interesting and could prove an asset for future negotiation with Kevin.

Exhaling shakily in the still air, he rises to his feet and continues his slow trek down the uneven path.

Neil is almost at the bottom when his foot sinks into the snow and doesn’t touch the ground. He loses his balance, toppling over forward and dragged down by the weight of his basket.

He lands violently on his side, something hard pressing against his ribcage even through the snow.

“Urgh,” he lets out when air comes back to his lungs.

He breathes in and out a few times, ignoring the pain lancing against his flank, and struggles to his feet.

Something moves in front of him, right on the edge of his peripheral vision. Neil stops brushing snow off his breeches and slowly, very slowly, looks up.

The dragon’s head is three times as wide as Neil’s whole body. It has large, very pale green eyes and it’s so close that Neil can count the fine scales running between its brows all the way down its nose.

Its powerful exhale envelops Neil in a cloud of white mist.

The sound that leaves Neil’s mouth is mostly involuntary, as is his step back. The dragon’s loud breathing morphs into a low growl. Neil freezes in his tracks.

 _I’m dead_ , he thinks, heart beating wildly in his chest. It’s probably better that the dragon doesn’t let him speak. He’d probably throw up if he opened his mouth right now.

Satisfied with Neil’s compliance, the dragon moves to the side, lithe and more graceful than any other animal Neil’s ever seen and most humans too. Neil cannot help hungrily taking it in, aware that it’s probably the only time he’ll see a specimen like this one from so close—and if things go awry, it’s probably the last thing he’ll ever see as well.

The dragon’s wings are mostly folded against its body, the left one held more rigidly than the right one. Neil gets a peek of the ugly burnt wound on shoulder before the dragon moves it out of his sight.

It circles around Neil entirely, cautiously, its body taut and ready to pounce. Neil holds himself still, only moving his eyes to track the dragon’s progress. It stops in his back, increasing Neil’s anxiety. The huge jaws could crush his torso in one go and he wouldn’t even see it coming.

A tug on his shoulder makes him fear the worst before he realizes that the interest of the dragon lies in the basket strapped to his back. He hears a loud sniffing from a large snout, then said appendice nudging his back, almost sending him rolling forward.

Moving as little as possible, Neil shrugs the strap off. The sniffing sound stops; the dragon’s tail moves back and forth in front of Neil, like it’s annoyed. He wants to tell the dragon he’s just helping him access the fish, but the dragon’s reaction to his voice wasn’t positive the first time. No need to test its patience now.

Finally, the basket falls on the ground, its contents spilling over the frozen ground.

The dragon pounces. Neil lunges forward, putting a healthy—maybe not healthy enough—distance between the two of them. Then he stops, disoriented, when he realizes the dragon is blocking his only exit. He takes a few steps farther down to the center of the cove, where a large pond lies, its water frozen still.

The dragon pays him no mind, even when Neil trips on a rock hidden in the deep snow. The ground here is more mush than smooth white, proof of the dragon’s attempts at flying away and its impatience.

The dragon does a quicker job of the fish that Neil thought it would. It soon turns back on Neil, and it’s even more obvious now that it’s holding its left wing slightly up, folded against its flank but not relaxed.

Then, to Neil’s astonishment, it sits back next to the basket of fish, licking its lips. Its ears—it has several, Neil notices, or two ears and few extra sets of flaps— swivel to face Neil.

“Uh,” Neil manages. “Good?”

The dragon takes that as a cue to stalk forward. Neil steels himself, locking his limbs in place not to run. Its inspection this time is gentler than the one before, more curious than focused.

Neil has almost managed to relax when the dragon starts growling.

“What?” Neil asks, watching its head rear back. He puts his hands on his hips without thinking about it; the growling intensifies.

Neil looks down. When he understands, he almost wants to laugh.

His knife, strapped to his thigh to accomodate for the longer layers of his winter clothes. Neil drops his hands to the holster, feeling for the buckle. The dragon reacts as violently as Neil was expecting, rearing back and spreading its wings, a clear intimidation tactic.

Ten minutes ago, it would have worked.

“I need to touch it to get rid of it,” Neil tells the dragon, fingers immobile on the holster. “Can I?”

The dragon calms down immediately. It shakes its head as it tucks its wings back against its body. The movement must have hurt its injured shoulder.

Neil deftly undoes the buckle and drops the holster in the snow, behind a rock. It’s not like a flimsy blade like this one will ever make a difference if the dragon decides that Neil can actually make a tasty lunch, now that it has had breakfast.

“Yeah,” he finds himself telling the dragon. “I don’t like knives much either.”

The dragon’s ears swivel again, constantly moving to catch his words. Neil starts considering the fact that it could be understanding human language.

“My name is Neil,” he starts, feeling foolish at first. When he sees how well he catches and keeps the dragon’s focus, he continues: “I don’t suppose you have a name. Would you be opposed to me giving you one?”

No answer.

“You’re a Night Fury,” Neil says. He tries to keep his voice low and even, avoiding brutal sounds. It’s difficult: the words catch in his throat more than once and he has to clear it discreetly. “We don’t know much about Night Furies, you know. You’re the first one I’ve seen. Not the first dragon, though.”

The dragon huffs at him. Considering it’s come here from a raid on the last island in the known sea that still suffers dragon attacks, Neil supposes that his claim isn’t impressive.

“It’s pretty rare to see dragons on Foxhole,” he defends himself. “So forgive me if I’m a little rusty.”

The dragon turns away. Neil would be offended, but he’s spent enough time around Andrew to learn not to take ombrage of people cutting a conversation short. It just means he’ll have to work harder to keep its attention.

He observes the way the dragon makes its way to a large flat rock near the water, where the snow has completely melted. He understands why a second later. To prepare for sleep, the dragon first warms the stone with a low but steady blast of fire. It’s so hot that it burns blue, but the dragon stamps on the embers like it can’t even feel it.

It makes Neil reevaluate the gravity and the origin of the wound on its shoulder. If the dragon’s scales are impervious to fire—as stands to reason—then the Ravens must really have developed new technology to fend off dragons. Perhaps the wound was inflicted by scraping the scales and skin off to the flesh, and then burning it.

He considers the pot of ointment he brought with him with skepticism. Well, it couldn’t hurt to hope.

The dragon lies facing Neil, casually pretending to be indifferent to him. It rests its tail next to its face, but Neil catches its green eyes watching him over the fins.

“Don’t mind me,” he says. “Just doing my thing.”

He wanders around the clearing, using a fallen branch to clear off the rest of the half-melted snow where the dragon has paced, and poking through the fresher layers where it hasn’t.

He finds a few scales next to the part of the cliff he saw the dragon trying to climb the previous day. He picks them up, noting their size—they fit in his palm—, their dry and smooth texture, their hardness when he knocks on them.

He pockets them, satisfied, then continues mock-searching, approaching the place where the dragon rests with large, slow circles. He’s nearing its rear legs when the dragon loses patience.

“Alright, alright,” Neil says when a small fire blast misses him by a foot. It wasn’t intended to reach him but it’s a clear warning sign. “I can take a hint. I’m going.”

He does, taking the basket with him. The path he climbed down from is easier to follow up, more of a climb than a hike. He doesn’t look back until he’s at the top, and then he can’t resist a peek over his shoulder.

The dragon is still lying on the rock, but its head is raised, ears shooting straight up. Neil tries not to think of his leaving as abandonment.

Neil finds himself going back everyday. Yule and winter preparations don’t leave him enough free time, but he finds himself eschewing some of his responsibilities to race to the depths of the forest.

The second time he comes with fish, the dragon almost jumps on top of him. It doesn’t eat as much as it did the first time, so Neil figures that dragons can limit their food intake for a few days, like wolves. He notes it down in his notebook when he’s back in the safety of his own house, hiding it after he’s done like a secret treasure.

After a week, Neil decides that it’s time he gives it a name. Referring to it as “the dragon” annoys him. He observes the dragon’s habit more closely for a few days, noting its playful spirit and its refusal to let Neil _too_ close in spite of it. The dragon’s pride and stubbornness are its two most defining features.

The dragon is a feat of muscles and wings that defy physics, but it’s also clumsy and endearingly prone to dumb accidents. One afternoon, so close to nightfall that Neil is really stretching the risks to his safety, he witnesses the dragon fall from a tree after the branch it tried to hang onto gives out.

“Impressive,” Neil calls from his seat on a rock he’s carefully wiped dry. “Did you know us humans call the Night Fury the king of the skies? Very regal of you.”

The dragon snorts as him, but the name sticks. After that, Neil calls him King.

He monitors the wound from afar, but the idea that he could have an active hand in King’s healing has been proven unrealistic the first time he saw the way the dragon reacted to eels.

Neil brought some in the midst of his usual stock of fish once. He’d chosen it in the piles of food because no one actually _likes_ eel, and so there is always a lot of it left. His pillaging in the stocks is starting to be noticed, as well. Neil has already heard Wymack be called to the smoking house once to resolve a problem that Neil didn’t linger long enough to hear about.

But King jumped three feet in the air when he smelt the eel and refused to go close to the fish before Neil threw it away (he replaced it in the stock later, feeling immeasurably guilty). After that, realizing the depth of his ignorance on anything relating to Night Furies, Neil gave up on trying to plaster ointment on King’s burns. It isn’t worth risking to make it worse.

King also seems to have taken it in stride. Under Neil’s watchful gaze he spends long minutes licking the wound clean with his long, scratchy tongue. It has the benefit of keeping it clean, and Neil’s doubts evaporate like snow in the sun when he realizes that it heals much quicker than he expected.

Within ten days, the skin around the wound is closed and pinkish, instead of a large and angry welt. Neil is sure that it’s still tender, though, and this is evidenced by King’s reluctance to fly anywhere.

“Give me a hand, why don’t you?” Neil says one day as he struggles down the now beaten path down the cliff.

His frequent trips have softened the snow and the soil until all that’s left is slippery mud. Neil’s feet slip on hidden rocks and rounded roots; he usually ends the last portion on his ass, to King’s great amusement.

King stops laughing—and what a weird discovery to find that he _does_ laugh, even if only to imitate Neil—and bounds toward him in three easy jumps. He raises himself on his hind legs, extending his snout until he can level Neil on his neck and bring him down.

It’s messy practice. Neil ends up plastered upside-down along his neck, holding on for dear life but not daring to squeeze too strongly with his legs. King’s scales are dry and hot under his cheek, a little rough when the skin scrapes against them the wrong way. He doesn’t have this problem with his gloved hands, perfectly protected by the raw leather that sticks satisfyingly to King’s back.

Neil files away the fact in his head, for later.

In the end, King dumps him on the wet ground. Neil gets up with a yelp when he feels the cold mud dampen the back of his pants.

“With help like that I could have gotten down myself,” he mutters.

King huffs in annoyance, going back to lie down with his back to Neil. Once again, Neil is forcefully reminded of Andrew.

One afternoon, when Neil is huddled against King for warmth while they wait for the worst of an unexpected snowstorm to fall, he asks the question that gnaws at him the most.

“Can’t you fly?” he asks. “I don’t think you’re up for long distances yet, but anything has to beat being stuck here.”

King levels him with a long stare. He doesn’t manifest more than that, choosing instead to gather Neil closer to his body until Neil is pillowed against King’s powerful legs, covered by his thin but surprisingly warm wing.

He ends up falling asleep. He wakes up on the hard ground the next morning, disoriented and panicked.

King raises his head when Neil sits up, looking unconcerned by the paling sky visible overhead through the high trees. Everything is covered in a thick layer of snow. Neil regrets the body warmth as soon as King’s wing slides off him.

“Fuck,” he swears, forcing himself to get up. His stiff muscles protest. “What time is it? Is it still morning? Why didn’t you wake me up?”

King yawns. As far as answers go, it’s one Neil can’t fight against.

“Ugh,” Neil says, stretching. He shivers in the cold. “I missed Yule preparations yesterday. Dan’s going to have my head.”

He walks to a small lump, half-hidden under a overhang. The extra fish he brought have all frozen in the basket, but King headbutts him away without a care. Neil selects the smallest one of the pile for himself.

“What?” he says. “I need to eat at least twice a day, and I skipped dinner yesterday.”

He hunts for a branch to empale the fish on and guts it quickly.

“A little bit of help?” he asks King when he’s done with his preparations.

King stops eating only long enough to send a low-intensity flame on the fish, burning the stick at the same time. It falls off Neil’s hand and buries itself in the snow, which has at least the benefit of putting out the flames.

“Thanks,” Neil lies as he digs his meal out of the snow. “Perfect.”

The skin of the fish is charred black. Neil suspects that the fire was too quick to cook it internally, but he doesn’t intend to stick around to find out.

“I’ll get going, then. Eat on the road. I have to be back before sunrise.”

King presses his nuzzle to the back of Neil’s knees in farewell. Neil struggles up the path alone, picking at the burnt skin of his fish. He’s met with slimy raw meat, unsuitable for human consumption.

He grimaces, giving up on breakfast, and speeds up. There are no tracks in the forest yet, leaving Neil’s grotesquely obvious. There is no time to go around and take a different path, though. He cuts through the forest as quickly as possible, arriving at the village a little after sunrise.

He detours by the pigpen, dumping his charred and raw fish on top of their morning food. It disappears in seconds. Relieved but stomach grumbling, Neil slips in through the back door of his house just minutes before someone knocks on his door.

He freezes in front of the fire he’s kindling back to life.

“Neil!”

“Coming,” Neil says. He quickly sheds his boots and coat, throwing them out of sight on the loft where he sleeps. He ruffles his hair, closes his eyes like he’s just been woken up, and shuffles to the door.

“Yes?” he croaks. Dan is standing on the other side with a deep frown on her face.

“Are you alright?” she asks point blank.

Neil coughs. “Yeah,” he lies.

“Are you sick?”

“Felt a little out of it yesterday.”

“I thought so.” Dan is too nurturing for her own good. She pinches her lips at the sight of what she’s spent years trying to avoid by bossing Neil around with good humor. “You didn’t come to the feast preparations yesterday.”

Neil opens his eyes like he’d forgotten. “Oh, fuck,” he rasps. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it, we did fine.” Dan sweeps his spluttering apology aside. “Renee came to the rescue. She even managed to drag Andrew into participating—he’s been eschewing his shifts. I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. You didn’t answer yesterday.”

“You knocked?”

“At least ten times.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear.”

“Now at least I know why.” She sighs. “I was afraid you’d taken off on one of your adventures and forgotten.”

Neil swallows down a spike of guilt. “Nope,” he says, swallowing thickly as though his throat hurts.

Dan shakes her head. “Go back to bed,” she says. “Get some rest and stay warm. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Neil looks at her leaving before slowly closing the door. He’s relieved his excuse worked but causing more stress for Dan leaves a bad taste on his tongue.

He busies himself with the fire, then drags his mattress down in front of the fireplace and lies down on it after changing into warmer clothes.

He feels restless all day, taking short naps in the afternoon that leave him disoriented and feeling like he wants to crawl out of his body.

* * *

Finding Kevin is an easy enough task on a good day. Being anxious makes him even more predictable. Neil knows as soon as he spots the ships at the docks, back from a cautious trip to Ravennest, that Kevin will stick to the small handful of people who are able to calm him down: Andrew and Wymack. Sometimes he climbs up to Abby’s tower, but she tends to desert it in the winter, preferring to operate in a place more appropriate to the harsh weather.

It feels weird to be looking through the village for Kevin, when Neil has spent the past couple of weeks avoiding any of his human acquaintances.

He decides to leave the smithy for last. He prefers to deal with Wymack’s lax questioning than Andrew’s curiosity in case his first guess is the wrong one.

Luck smiles on Neil for once; Kevin is in the Great Hall with Wymack.

Kevin is, technically, the son of the chief, but Dan is the one who’s set to succeed to her adoptive father. Everyone feared the tension between the two of them and the risk of a fight, but Kevin has never had any pretentions to chiefdom. Which is probably for the best, because as intelligent as he is, he’s a terrible leader of men.

He occupies an awkward place among the Foxes, a former dragon warrior in a clan of people who haven’t raised a weapon against one in decades. Like Neil, Kevin was raised on Ravennest. Like Neil, he didn’t escape without his share of scars.

Kevin was the first major breach in Mary’s directives that Neil consciously made. Her orders had always been for reclusiveness, even on Foxhole, and for five years Neil obeyed them. He avoided the looks and words of his classmates and fellow apprentices when he was growing up. He closed off his ears to their jokes, their taunts and their invitations. He disappeared in the background until Andrew’s natural suspicion washed over him without catching him.

And then there was Kevin, who stepped down from the boat that brought back Wymack and the delegation from the annual south-western clans’ meeting. Kevin was Wymack’s son, everyone knew—but they also knew that Kevin had been taken in by chief Moriyama’s younger brother when his mother died, and that all of Wymack’s attempts at getting custody of his son peacefully had failed.

The village also saw the state of Kevin’s hand and the way it healed badly, his fingers curled up out of shape.

Kevin would never fight dragons with the same precision as he had in the past. Neil knew him from his childhood, had recognized him and heard of him in the five years that he’d spent away from Ravennest. His reputation as a dragon expert was unparalleled. He was swift; every strike of his, precise and honed with practice.

The truth, Neil has learned as he befriended Kevin, is more nuanced. Kevin knows everything there is to know about dragons because he is obsessed with them. His interest is purely academical and his skill, theoretical. He’s never actually striked at a dragon—that glory was reserved for Riko. Kevin learned from books and accounts of older warriors, and hurled his axe with deadly accuracy at wooden dummies.

When he got to Foxhole, nothing about that changed, except that he found fewer attentive ears. Children like his stories, but their mothers glare daggers at Kevin when the children wake up in the middle of the night after dreaming of being boiled alive by Scauldrons. No real dragon has been seen on Foxhole Island in generations—until now.

Kevin is Neil’s best bet, but he’s also incapable of keeping his mouth shut about someone else’s secret. Neil, who was raised to lie and keep mum, finds it both boggling and incredibly irritating. The worst part is that the person Kevin is most likely to babble to, aside from his father, is Andrew, who Neil would like to keep out of this affair as much as possible.

It’s been five years since Kevin arrived on Foxhole, scared off his wits of going back. One would think he would have learned independence and stopped relying so much on Andrew’s relative protection, but it’s still difficult to see one without the other around the village.

Matt likes to play up his incredulity at their relationship, but Neil knows better. They’re friends.

But Andrew has never cared for dragons. He always leaves whenever Kevin gets into a rant of his. Neil suspects this is because Andrew is sort of like a dragon himself: prickly and grumpy, surrounded by fire and sharp blade. Protective of his own. Stubborn, too: he’s probably capable of understanding human speech, yet he almost always elicits to do his own bidding in spite of what anyone tells him to.

Kevin is arguing with his father when Neil sneaks in the mess that evening.

It’s nothing new; Kevin is always arguing with people. Neil is half-convinced that it’s his main form of communication. To Kevin, anything else than a heated conversation proves a lack of seriousness. Neil waits on the side until Wymack heaves a deep sigh, clasps Kevin on the shoulder and steps outside.

“I have to show you something,” he tells Kevin as soon as their chief is out of hearing range.

“I have a book to finish,” Kevin complains. He’s the best scribe in the village. Other clans even commission him through the traders who sail from island to island. “You know I need the light.”

“You can finish it later; no trading ship travels this far in the winter anyway. Your commissions can wait for spring.”

“It’s for Abby.”

“So you can tell her sorry in person. Come on.”

Kevin doesn’t protest long. He follows Neil outside in the chilly afternoon. In spite of what Kevin said, night is already falling. They’re silent as they cross the village; Neil is waiting impatiently for the last homes to disappear before he tells Kevin what he’s bringing him to see.

The smithy is still open, glowing red from the inside like a giant fire. Sounds of metal scraping against metal cover their footsteps. Neil drags Kevin away before he can say something stupid like, “I have to tell Andrew this one thing,” and brings Andrew’s stoic inquisitiveness upon them.

Kevin’s complaints pick up when they start walking deeper into the forest. Snow has started to fall, catching on Neil’s eyelashes. They draw up their hoods.

“Where are we going?” Kevin asks again, frowning. “We’re not on the holly-picking teams for Yule preparations.”

“Thank the gods for that,” Neil says. The skin of his hands is ruined enough without holly scratches all over his knuckles. “It’s not for the Yule preparations. I’ll tell you later.”

“Five minutes before arriving so I don’t change my mind out of laziness?”

“Yeah,” Neil says, surprised. “I’m impressed you saw through that.”

“That’s Andrew’s tactic too,” Kevin grumbles.

Neil is amused in spite of himself. “Smart.”

“You’ve always been too supportive of him,” Kevin sighs.

“You’re the one who befriended him. I keep a neutral distance. And _he_ can’t stand me,” Neil reminds Kevin. “He’s decided I was a threat or something and has been giving me the eye for years.”

Kevin actually stops at that. Neil walks almost ten feet before he realizes that he’s not being followed anymore. When he turns, frowning, Kevin has his hands on his hips.

“Is this what you think?” he asks, incredulity coloring his tone even more haughty than usual.

“It’s pretty clear.”

“Andrew doesn’t hate you.”

“Could have fooled me,” Neil says. “Are we going or not?”

“We’re talking about Andrew,” Kevin insists, but he actually starts walking again.

“I’d rather talk about something else.” At Kevin’s protest, Neil pushed him forward, hands on his shoulders. They’re almost at the cove. His voice is light when he says, “Like this dragon I found.”

Step one: incomprehension.

“Neil,” Kevin says, stopping so abruptly that Neil bumps into him. “What the fuck.”

King raises his head at the sound of their voices. Neil has to give credit where credit is due: Kevin doesn’t back down from the dragon’s intense green stare. If anything, he steps closer to the edge.

Step two: incredulity.

“I can’t believe this,” Kevin hisses. “A dragon on Foxhole Island? How could this happen?”

“He crashed there after the raid on Ravennest,” Neil mentions. He gestures with his hand. “See on the left shoulder, there? He’s been hurt, but I don’t know how to properly treat it.”

Step three: acceptance.

“Stunning,” Kevin comments. “Unlike any other I’ve ever seen.”

Step four: interest.

“It’s a Night Fury,” Kevin notes passionately. He crouches down on the rock formation, a good twenty feet above King. He pats his pockets, slipping out a notebook and a charcoal pencil.

“He crashed there after the raid on Ravennest. I saw him go down during the night, and followed the tracks here the next day.”

Step five—step five.

“I named him King,” Neil says.

“‘Him’? Neil, this is a female dragon.”

In the cove, King is still watching them watch him—watch _her_.

“How do you know?” Neils asks dumbly.

Kevin glances at him. “How do you not?”

Of course, Kevin’s knowledge is not entirely useless, although it is far more limited that Neil would have hoped. He looks at the wound on King’s shoulder from afar and affirms that dragon saliva has healing properties.

“Really,” says Neil, who’s never heard of that particular lore.

“Just for their own breed,” Kevin explains. “It won’t heal humans or even other dragons.”

“So it’s good that she’s been licking it so much? I was wondering if she wasn’t preventing the wound from closing.”

Kevin nods. “I’d need to get closer to see it properly, but if you tell me that her movements are easier, I would say it’s good.”

Neil understands the barely-hidden question, but King answers for him. Tired of being watched from above and troubled by the presence of a stranger, she hisses at them, throwing herself on her rear legs. She opens her wings, making herself look like a bigger threat.

Kevin is watching her with unconcealed interest. Because Neil knows her so well, he can see how she still holds her left wing stiffer and slightly crooked, but he sees Kevin’s focus immediately zero on it. He moves his hands, framing her between his fingers, like he’s studying one of Andrew’s invention diagrams.

Neil withstands his questions and remarks for almost an hour, until he finally manages to bully Kevin into going back to the village. He waits until they’re almost at the tree line before stopping Kevin.

“You can’t tell anyone about it,” he warns. “This has to be a complete secret.”

“Then why did you tell me? Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.”

“I know. It just—feels too big to bear by myself.” Neil turns the situation over in his head. “You’re the dragon expert.”

“I’ll keep your secret,” Kevin says, with a rare bout of human understanding. “She’ll be healed soon anyway, and then she’ll fly off. We can both keep mum until then.”

Neil’s step falters. “Sure,” he lies. “And this means no telling Andrew.”

“Of course.” Now Kevin sounds offended.

“Even if he asks.”

“I can’t lie to Andrew.”

“You’ll have to,” Neil insists. “Or make sure that he doesn’t have reasons to suspect anything.”

“Alright,” Kevin says. “I’ll be careful. I’m not actually entirely useless.”

“I never said you were. I know you; you’re one of the most knowledgeable people on this island. But I know Andrew too.”

“He can be insistent.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Neil mutters.

They walk down the hill to the village, lost in their considerations.

It’s their fault, really; with the years, Neil has grown too careless. Mary would never have let him drop his guard so much.

“Kevin,” a voice says from Neil’s left.

They both turn sharply toward the smithy, where Andrew is standing, one arm braced against the doorframe. Neil wishes he could close his eyes in frustration, but he wills himself to look unruffled.

“Andrew,” Kevin greets in return, like they’re chiefs from rival clans meeting formally and not friends of five years.

Sometimes Neil wonders about Kevin and Andrew’s way of building and maintaining a friendship. Then he remembers that he’s not much better, and also that he doesn’t care.

“It’s night,” Andrew says.

The words are simple, but his heavy gaze is not. There’s a world of unspoken questions that he conveys through his body language. Neil resists the urge to lie in Kevin’s place. The first rule of lying is knowing when and how it can be useful. Letting Kevin speak right now is more likely to assuage Andrew’s inquisiveness.

Kevin sighs. “I know,” he says. “Neil found some weird boar tracks and he wanted to show them to me. We have to tell Dan. It could compromise the boar hunt for the Yule feast. I can’t believe we’re having this problem now, on top of everything else.”

Neil is almost impressed. For someone who’s so open with his criticism, Kevin does come up with credible lies; not only is he an expert on all things dragons, but Kevin is also one of the village’s best hunters.

Andrew’s expression remains blank, even if he drops his stiff pose. “Been spending a lot of time in the woods, haven’t you, Neil?”

“With the village in this state?” Neil says, looking disgruntled. “You get to hole up in the forge and bang on metal all day. Some of us don’t have that luxury. Dan’s becoming a dictator.”

Kevin jumps on the occasion. “Maybe you should take this opportunity to pick up an apprenticeship,” he says. “You’ve never stuck with one. This could be your chance—”

“Kevin,” Neil warns. This time he doesn’t have to make an effort to sound genuine, and he suspects Kevin doesn’t either. They’ve had this argument countless times over the years. “Drop it.”

It has the effect they wanted; Andrew turns on his heels, going back inside, presumably bored with their quibbling. Neil doesn’t fault him. He pushes Kevin forward, waiting for him to drop the charade, but Kevin’s riled himself up; he doesn’t stop talking about Neil’s future until they’re standing in front of his house.

* * *

Unfortunately, the lie wasn’t enough to stop all of Andrew’s curiosity.

Neil forces himself to take longer detours to avoid passing by the forge, going into the south woods. It doubles his walking time, so he can’t spend as much time as he’s used to with King, which in return makes her grumpy.

At least he can monitor her shoulder wound better now, thanks to Kevin’s help. It takes his mind off Andrew’s scrutiny and Dan’s frenzied efforts to whip a village full of Vikings into shape for a days-long feast. Meade is sure to flow freely; Neil dreads the clean-up process.

A handful of days before Yule, Neil tries to explain it to King.

“I probably won’t be able to see you so much,” he says, dumping a basket full of game in a hole in the ground.

He’s taken to catching his own to lessen the amount of food he takes in the village’s storehouse, which means that some of the meat is fresh and not smoked. Neil covers it with snow again, marking the place with stones. The stones are for himself: he’s pretty sure King will be able to smell rabbits even through two feet of snow and frozen ground.

King tracks his movements with her head, like she’s checking to make sure he doesn’t skip any under her nose.

“It’s a village-wide celebration,” he tells her. “I’ll be too close to people to come and get you some food, so you’ll have to make it last. Alright?”

King warbles in response. Neil hopes it’s an agreement. He’s pretty sure she’s worlds better at understanding what he says than he is with her. It’s frustrating at times, having to throw out a communication line without ever being certain that someone is gripping it on the other side.

Neil glances up at the sky. The day is dark and stormy, with a thick layer of gray clouds hiding the sun. He’s pretty sure they’re headed for a storm within the next few days.

“Alright,” he repeats, scratching her under the chin, where she likes it. She closes her eyes and lets out a deep rumble, like a purr. “I have to go.”

Her eyes open so quickly at his words that this time there’s no doubt she’s understood. She lifts her head, stepping back and fretting with her wings. She jumps in front of the path Neil uses to climb out of the cove.

“No,” he says, trying to push her away. “I don’t want to play, I really need to go back—”

King has gotten better at playfighting than she used to be; she’s more gentle with Neil and less hesitant of the way he has to use his arms instead of legs and wings. Neil pushes at her gently to indicate that he’s not looking to play, but it backfires when he leaves his guard open.

She dives under his arm, raising them with her large snout. He barely has time to react when he feels her teeth—her retractable teeth, which she never uses with him—hook into his belt.

With a powerful shake of her head, she’s dumping him on her back.

“Urgh,” Neil splutters, struggling to find his balance.

She’s thrown him front to back, with his legs haphazardly sliding around her neck and his face an inch close to the pikes down her spine. Neil tries to contain his annoyance as he sorts out his limbs, swivelling so he can at least see her head.

“What are you doing?” he asks as he swipes his leg over her wing.

He takes care not to rub against her shoulder, even if the wound is almost invisible to the eye now, only leaving behind a twisted scar, like the ones peppered on Neil’s torso.

King warbles back, turning her head so she can look at him. She steps further into the cove, spreading her wings. Her body moves under Neil’s, the muscles in her shoulders and wings translating directly into his legs. He has to grab her once to avoid slipping and he scoots backward, resting further down her back rather than her neck.

He can’t contain his awe as she walks. He’s known she was powerful; her size only is intimidating, even for someone who grew up among bulky yaks.

Her scales are almost soft under his hands, supple and warm in a way that reptiles shouldn’t be. He rests his hand on the side of her neck.

“Alright,” he says. “You can put me down, now.”

King doesn’t listen. Her tail flicks the ground a few times, her wings shiver in the windless air, and then suddenly they’re spreading on each side of Neil.

“King,” Neil calls, trying to keep the worry out of his voice. “Don’t—”

He doesn’t have time to finish his sentence; with one strong propulsion of her legs, she’s in the air.

Neil swallows his scream.

He scrambles to find purchase. The last time he was on a dragon, he was securely held by his mother, and the dragon’s anatomy made it easier for him to hang onto a spinal spike. But King is smooth and compact, and it takes Neil a moment to find a proper position.

King’s wings are moving with purpose on each side of Neil, and he cranes his neck to see the way they almost touch over his head.

They’re flying. King, injured and bound to the ground for days, is flying. Neil, who never thought he’d see, much less climb onto a dragon ever again, is _flying_.

They rise above the tree line soon enough. King lets out a roar, obviously delighted at the freedom she gained back. Neil looks at the pond, growing smaller with every beat of King’s wings. When he rights himself, focusing his attention back to King, he sees that they’re headed directly for the sea.

“Wait,” he says, fear gripping his gut. King speeds up, not heeding his words. Wind bats at his face with enough force that to make breathing difficult, so Neil angles his face down toward her neck, trying to protect himself. “Wait!”

King stops flapping her wings. She looks back at him with an inquisitive groan, her ears pivoting to catch his voice.

“You can’t go too far,” Neil says. “I have to back to the village.”

They’re gliding now, lazily. King’s wings are both extended to their full span to catch as much air as needed to lift them. If Neil had any doubts that her shoulder is healed now, they’re gone.

Something lodges in his throat as he thinks about what it means.

“You have to put me down,” he says loudly over the rush of air in his ears. “Before you go. I can’t go with you.”

King grumbles. Neil isn’t sure she’ll listen to him, but a second later she’s turned back toward Foxhole Island, previously in their back. She straightens up, the back of her body pointing down, until they’re hovering without advancing.

It’s like she’s telling Neil to look at his island. He can see the village from there, the tiny forms of the houses. People are smaller than ants; he can’t distinguish any.

“I know,” he tells her. “That’s where I want to stay. Also, can we please go horizontal again? I’m going to fall off.”

He’s almost hugging her neck. He can feel his legs bearing against the joint of her wings with her body, close to her former wound, but the weight of his body drags him down away from her back.

King shakes her head. Her wings still for a second before she flaps them with a new vigor. And then she dives, straight toward the ground, and Neil loses the battle with his voice.

This time, exhilaration wins over fear. He could laugh. He’s pretty sure he’s grinning.

He doesn’t linger after their flight. As far as he’s concerned, King doesn’t need him anymore. She’s given him the best gift he could ask for, and Neil isn’t one for goodbyes. He runs almost all the way back to his house, the pumping of his legs being a poor substitute for the strength of King’s wings and the speed of their flight.

He’s out of breath when he arrives home. He forgot to take another way, so he runs right past the smithy, down to the village’s square, up the stairs leading to his house. People greet him and he doesn’t answer. It’s better that they think he’s in a hurry, rather than be faced with the storm of emotions rolling inside him.

Andrew is at the booth counter of the forge when Neil runs by, and Neil is sure he can feel his eyes on his back all the way through the village.

By the time night falls, the elation has fallen. He goes to bed with an empty stomach and an empty head, something striking inside of him. He knows grief. This is suspiciously similar, even if everything inside Neil’s head tells him that grieving the departure of a dragon is illogical.

He resists going back to the cove as long as he can. He’ll have to, at some point, to check that the food he left behind for King doesn’t spoil. Maybe she’s eaten all of it, for strength before a long trip. Neil has no idea where she’ll go; there are plenty of inhabited and uninhabited islands around Foxhole, but Neil has no idea if she’s native to one in particular.

Night Furies are rare. Even Kevin, with his boundless knowledge and his thick Book of Dragons, couldn’t tell Neil anything that he didn’t already know.

The second night before Yule, Neil is woken up by scraping on his roof.

Activity over head isn’t out of the ordinary; on an island, seagulls are always everywhere, often perching on top of houses. He’s had to fight off a few dormhouses from the space between his roof slates and the highest beam, too.

This is different.

Neil sits up in bed, old fears rekindling. He remembers staying up at night listening for noise in his father’s house. There were dragon raids to be careful of. There were fears inside the house itself, the unpredictability of violence.

The noise moves to the sloped side of his roof, a long scrap against the slates. Neil silently tugs on his coat and boots, getting up for the knife he keeps on a table far from his bed.

Something thumps against his backdoor. This is expected: the back faces away from the village, up the hill that leads farther out into the woods. It’s a logical place to find an animal, if it is one; it’s also a weakness of the house against human attacks, which is why Neil only built it when his mother died.

He makes his way down the stairs of the loft silently, holding up the knife.

Something large is scratching and bumping against the door. It could be a wolf or a yak from the size of it, but there is no reason either of the two would ever approach a human dwelling. Winter isn’t harsh enough for the small pack of wolves that lives on the far side of the island to come close to the village out of desperation.

And yaks are enclosed in a paddock for the night.

Neil throws the door open, and a dragon almost falls inside.

King is grotesquely large, standing on the doorstep of Neil’s human-sized house. She’s almost invisible in the night, but the dying embers of Neil’s fireplace illuminate her eyes. Her black scales don’t glow, as though absorbing all color. It’s the first time Neil has ever seen her this close at night.

There is a reason, he thinks, that the Night Fury is said to own the darkness.

There is also a reason as to why King is standing there on Neil’s back door.

“Why are you here?” he hisses at her.

King doesn’t answer. She sniffs Neil up and down, lodging her head through the door deeper to investigate the inside of his house. Neil follows her eyes until he sees the smoked fish hanging from the ceiling beam.

“Food?” he asks her. “You want food?”

King warbles.

“You can fly!” he tells her. “You can fish your own food!”

She sits, her ears pointing straight forward, and Neil gives up. He throws her the biggest fish he has, trying not to feel like his heart could beat out of his chest with relief.

“You stupid reptile,” he tells her as he watches her gobble up the fish in two bites. “I thought you left. You were _supposed_ to leave.”

King closes her eyes. She inclines her head down until she can press her nose against Neil’s stomach, resting there lightly. Her breath is hot, warming him through his clothes. He rests a hand on her snout, brushing the delicate skin.

“Don’t you want to leave?” he asks. “You could.”

There’s no answer from King, but she doesn’t object when he leads her back to the cove.

She’s still there the next morning, when he comes in with a long strap of leather.

“Just for me to hold on to,” he tells her. “Look, I padded it with fabric.”

King sniffs the contraption and lets Neil hooks it around her shoulders when he’s done. He lets her help him up to her back, sitting in the spot he discovered on their first flight, bracketed by her wings.

“I have some time today,” he says, drawing his hood up. “Let’s go.”

He can feel King’s body coil down on itself. The next moment, she’s jumping in the air, and they’ve left the cove behind them within a few seconds. Neil looks back, whooping, and lies as flat as possible along King’s nape.

The leather strap makes it easier for him to hold still and comfortable. Flying this fast is as exhilarating as the first time. Knowing that King came back for him is just as thrilling.

They fly over the village once before heading out for the ocean, and Neil can feel all of his worry melt off like snow.

* * *

“Ah,” a voice says behind Neil. “So this is where you always run to.”

The strap he’s unwoven from King’s neck slips from Neil’s hands and falls down in the snow with a dull sound. He feels his heart lodge somewhere nearby, down in his stomach.

“Andrew,” he starts, and stops.

Andrew’s face is expressionless as always, blank like one of Neil’s notebook pages. He doesn’t look mad, or revulsed, or—anything, really.

Lying is an instinct that would do Neil more harm than good. There is no lying with Andrew; he is as temperamental as a dragon and twice as stubborn. Honesty is the only way forward.

“Go on,” Andrew says after a minute. “Tell me that it isn’t what I think it is. Keep lying. You know you’re good at it.”

Behind Neil, King draws herself to her full size, huffing deeply. Pressed as she is against Neil’s back, he can feel her ribcage expand with the movement. He places a hand on her flank, trying to communicate silently with her.

“It’s fine,” he tells her. “It’s fine. It’s just Andrew.”

“I’m waiting,” Andrew says, crossing his arms. The simply ornamented handles of his knives glisten on his forearms.

Neil eyes them warily. After living his entire life in the same village as him, he knows just how fast Andrew is with his blades. Neil is good at ducking, but there’s King to worry about. He can feel her about to strike, contained maybe only by Neil in her way.

Andrew has always seemed impossibly solid to Neil, refusing to let others move him against his will. He has no undue respect for authority, but no rebellious streak either; most people avoid him because of it. More than anything, Andrew dances to his own tune. To Neil’s eyes, who spent his childhood terrified of his father and his later years bullied by his mother’s snapping words, this is admirable.

It doesn’t seem much when confronted to the mass of King’s body, all thirty feet of it. She coils up on herself, tail swinging; next to Neil, her jaws open a fraction. The back of her throat glows purple.

“No!” Neil cries out, stepping aside into the path of the fire.

Something grips his sleeve, yanking him sideways. The blast misses Neil by an inch before he loses his balance and crumples into a snowdrift.

“Ack,” he says, struggling to his feet.

The sight that welcomes him as soon as he brushes snow off his eyes makes him forget about the snow wetting his clothes. Cold is creeping sharp fingers down his coat, but it doesn’t matter when confronted with the sight of Andrew and King facing off.

“For fuck’s sake,” Neil says, stomping down to where the pair are still sizing each other up.

Apparently, Andrew not only tugged Neil out the path of the blast but also jumped forward, closing the distance between himself and King. It effectively would have protected Neil a little more, if he’d had any inclination to let the fight burst.

“Stop this,” he says, planting himself between the two. “King, back off. He’s not dangerous to me. Andrew, we need to talk.”

Andrew’s disinterested expression comes back so fast Neil barely has time to register the surprisingly intense look that previously sat there.

“There’s nothing to talk about.” He makes a dismissive gesture.

“What you just saw—”

“I can’t decide,” Andrew cuts in, voice rising, “if you’re really that stupid or smarter than you look after all.”

“What?”

“It’s like this.” Andrew gestures to King, standing tall and heavy behind Neil. “either you’re doing this in spite of everything you’ve ever been taught, or there is more to this than meets the eye.”

“You haven’t let me explain yet,” Neil points out. “Maybe the answer lies there.”

“I’m undecided.”

“On whether to hear me out?”

“On whether it’s worth it.”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Neil asks. He feels confused and a little blindsided, despite the fact that Andrew is the one who walked in on something that overturns his world.

“Being associated with your growing idiocy might prove an inconvenience to me.”

“You live with Aaron,” Neil can’t help but quip.

“Irrelevant.”

“But true.”

Andrew’s finger is cold where the nail bites into Neil’s jaw. He’s no wearing gloves in spite of the weather. Neil lets him move his head around.

“Your stupidity appalls me,” Andrew says finally.

He leaves without another word or a glance backward. King shuffles in the snow until his silhouette disappears among the dark trunks of the forest lying ahead.

“Well,” Neil says, tipping his head back. “That was something.”

King snorts. Her hot breath envelops Neil, startling the cold out of him. He blinks, suddenly made aware of the growing darkness. Night fell in the short time since he touched down.

He represses a swear. He’s going to be late for the feast’s preparations, and then Kevin and Dan will be on his back all evening for it.

When Neil enters the Great Hall, Dan is standing on the council table directing people around. She looks frazzled, her short hair ruffled and her face flushed like she’s been yelling around to be heard over the general noise.

She looks relieved to see him, which immediately makes him feel guilty for his lateness.

“Neil! I’m so glad you’re here.”

“I was scheduled to help tonight,” Neil replies awkwardly.

Dan steps down from the table. “We’re a few people short,” she says. “One of the twins never showed up—Andrew, I think, I don’t know, I just saw blonde hair.”

Something twists farther into a knot in Neil’s stomach. “Probably Andrew,” he agrees.

“I guess you would know,” Dan says, side-eyeing him.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re the only one he talks to apart from his family and Kevin. Aren’t you friends?”

Well, Andrew definitely isn’t his biggest fan, if Neil goes by the way he reacted to King, and whatever Kevin might say.

“Isn’t there stuff to be done?” he replies instead.

“Right. We still need to make some holly crowns—can you go and give Renee a hand over there?”

Neil nods, leaving Dan behind to be assaulted with questions from idle workers. The corner Dan pointed him to is far from the fire, lit by smoky torches which make his eyes water.

He coughs once, his breath catching in his throat; Renee looks up from the stack of holly spread over a table. “There you are,” she says. Then: “Are you alright?”

“Yeah. Just a little tired.”

“You look a little cold. Did something happen?”

Ah, yes. Going on an above-clouds flight and being thrown aside in the snow by Andrew wet Neil’s layers to the skin. He shivers once, reminded of his own pitiful state.

“I’m fine,” he says. “I just spent some time outside.”

“Not the best day for that,” Renee notes. “There’s a snow storm coming in.”

Neil hums noncommittally. “The sooner we start this, the sooner we can get back home.”

Renee takes the hint, handing him a metal circle to weave holly onto while she gestures for him to follow her around the table. There’s already a small pile of crowns and boughs on the table; with the two of them focused on the task, they advance quickly.

It’s a good thing the work is easy and mindless; the further along the evening, the slower Neil’s tired brain is to react. His clothes warm with the effort but don’t dry entirely, hanging around him like the world’s most uncomfortable drapes.

By the time he stands back up, he can’t feel his feet anymore. He almost loses his balance on impact, stumbling into the table.

Renee stabilizes him. “I think we’re done for today,” she says. “They’ve started serving the meal. Do you want to come?”

The idea of sitting close to the giant fire roaring in the fireplaces is tempting, more so than the dismal cold of Neil’s own home, but he suspects that he won’t be able to get up if he sits down to a warm meal now.

“No,” he says. “I’ll just go home, sleep it off.”

“Alright. See you tomorrow, then.”

Neil manages a wave for Renee and Dan, who looks way more at ease now that the work teams have disbanded. A blast of icy wind welcomes him when he pushes past the tall doors of the mess; he burrows inside his hood, slipping on his gloves.

The gale pushes him back home. He stumbles into his house, stupidly grateful to be cut from the wind. He lights a fire, undresses, and lays his clothes to dry mechanically. He considers brewing something, to deal with his throat, clogging by the minute, but he ultimately lacks the strength.

He can just about crumple on his bed and go to sleep.

The cold wakes Neil up.

He takes a deep breath—or at least tries to. His nose is so stuffed he can barely breathe, and his throat so sore that he can’t swallow. He knows he should drag himself up to tend to the fire and go outside. Tonight is the first day of Yule: he really can’t miss the festivities.

But his head is so heavy that Neil can do nothing but lie with his face halfway into his pillow, shivering and sweating under the blankets. His head is pounding in time with his heartbeat. He thinks he can hear the sea directly in his ear, or a sort of constant humming like the sound King makes when she’s above to fire.

The thought of King makes him open his eyes again. The inside of the house is dark, windowless and without fire.

With more effort than he can ever remember getting up taking, Neil sits up in his bed. He’s shivering uncontrollably, but the idea of dragging his covers closer fills him with dread.

Fever. He has a fever. What a stupid consequence to finding a dragon and befriending it enough to ride it. If he weren’t already feeling so badly, Neil would be mad at himself.

He drags himself out of bed, taking a blanket in his hand. He’s not sure why.

Navigating the stairs proves to be more difficult than expected. Neil is out of breath after taking two steps down, and he loses his balance, sitting down heavily midway through.

He drags the blanket halfway up over himself, curls up with his head on his lap and closes his eyes.

 _Five minutes_ , he tells himself. He can rest for five minutes.

A loud bang pulls him of his torpor. He blinks in the darkness, head heavy like it’s stuffed full with wool.

A rectangle of light shines in Neil’s sore eyes. After a moment, Neil’s sight adjusts enough that he can recognize the low, gray light of an overcast winter day through the open door. It must still be early; today is the first day of Yule, the longest night of the year.

He’s distantly curious, like he’s remembering the memory of it rather than feeling it first hand.

Footsteps climb his stairs. Neil groans and starts getting before the blonde person—Andrew, no doubt—can reach him.

“I’m fine,” he rasps.

Andrew stops on the step under him. He’s carrying a basket, which he puts down behind him.

“You look like death,” is the answer. “You can ride a dragon one day and look like that the next?”

“I look like that because I rode a dragon,” Neil says. He starts the long process of turning back up the stairs.

“Dangerous past time.”

“Just caught a cold because _someone_ pushed me in the snow afterwards.”

Andrew doesn’t reply. He follows Neil back to his bed, pushing him down. “Clothes,” he asks, snapping his fingers under Neil’s nose. Neil blinks at him.

“What?”

“Clothes. Change them, they’re soaked through.”

“In the chest over there.” Neil gestures vaguely to the chest sitting in a corner.

Andrew walks up to it when it becomes clear that Neil doesn’t intend to get up, but he hesitates once, laying his hand on the clasp. Neil stares at him. He wonders briefly if he’s just imagined the conversation and Andrew has no actual idea what Neil sent him to the chest for. It’s possible. Neil feels all out of sorts; he hasn’t been actually sick for years.

Andrew lifts the lid after a second. He rummages inside, throwing his findings on the bed. Neil watches a shirt flop down next to him, its sleeves falling over the edge of the mattress. He looks for strength to gather enough to care and grab the clothes, finding it as Andrew crosses the loft for the stairs.

Neil changes his clothes. Standing makes him dizzy, and he has to stop with one leg in his trousers to grab the foot of the bed for balance. He manages it, in the end, but he has no idea how long it’s been.

He can still hear Andrew on the main floor of his house, so he takes his blanket again and makes his way down the stairs. This time he manages it entirely, stopping at the foot of the stairs when he realizes that Andrew’s occupying the place Neil was aiming for, in front of the fireplace.

“He lives,” Andrew says mockingly.

Neil makes a vague sound of protest. He watches Andrew light up the fire, wishing King were there.

“King could light a fire without effort,” he tells Andrew, because Andrew knows, now.

“King,” Andrew repeats. It’s not exactly a question.

“Night Fury,” Neil replies as he all but drops in the armchair in front of the fireplace.

“Your pet dragon.” Andrew’s tone is pointed, but Neil doesn’t have to strength to try and decipher his mood. He closes his eyes, drawing a stool closer with his feet.

“She’s not a pet,” he says. “More like—a being.”

“Stop talking,” is Andrew’s response. “Children should be seen and not heard.”

“Not a child.”

“You have the same risk-assessment skills as one.”

Neil opens an eye, glaring at Andrew’s back. “You’re just jealous,” he says.

“Of your cool pet dragon?”

“I told Kevin first and he didn’t report it back to you. Your hold on him can seem quite unhealthy sometimes, you know.”

Neil is mumbling now, but Andrew must hear well enough. He stands up, flames jumping high in the fireplace behind him, and turns to face Neil.

“I have no hold on Kevin,” he says. “Kevin tells me things because he gets too anxious to deal with them alone. Do not talk about what you don’t know.”

Neil shrugs. He draws the blankets closer. He doesn’t have to wait long:

“Why did you tell Kevin?”

“She was wounded. Hurt from the raid on Ravennest. I wanted to know if there was anything I could do.”

“We know nothing about Night Furies,” Andrew says. “Even Kevin would have been useless.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Everything. I’ve been by Kevin’s side for five years. He tends to babble.”

“Didn’t think you’d listen,” Neil replies, closing his eyes again.

Warmth is slowly filtering to him. Lighting a fire was a good idea; Neil has been neglecting to do it for so long that the whole house is cold and silent in the way that empty buildings always are. The crackling of the flames is soothing. Andrew’s footsteps on the floor of his house—his empty, silent house, where Neil has spent as little time as possible since his mother died—fill something a hole in him that he didn’t even know had been dug.

Neil dozes off for a while. He can vaguely hear Andrew around the room, and only realizes he did when he wakes up.

“Ready,” Andrew says, pouring something into one of Neil’s metal tumblers.

Neil takes it when it’s handed to him, letting the metal warm his hands. The heady perfume of glögg wafts through his cold. Andrew is holding a cup of his own, sitting down in a seat next to Neil. They stare at the fire for a while.

Neil feels utterly warm. He rests the tumbler against his cheek, absorbing the heat. His mind wanders, out of the small house and through the village where Foxes are gathering for the traditional bonfire in the center of the village. It’ll be a large, roaring thing, with people gathered around, fending off the cold and the darkness.

Andrew breaks the silence after a while, like they’ve never interrupted the conversation.

“What will you do with a Night Fury?”

“I don’t know,” confesses Neil. his voice is hoarse from the cold and disuse. “I think she wants to stay for now.”

“And when she gets tired of that cove? Anyone from the village could stumble upon her.”

“I don’t want to think about it for now,” Neil says, tipping back his head. “I’m the first person on Foxhole to befriend and ride a dragon. I want to celebrate that.”

“It’s Yule,” Andrew says simply. “You have a week to celebrate.”

Outside, Neil can hear the cheers from the square, where the fires have been lit and the holly boughs hung up. The whole village is gathered for night fall; this is, as always, a communal occasion. There’s no living on the fringes, on Foxhole Island. Everyone always knows everyone’s business, and no celebration is personal.

But what Andrew and Neil have, a moment of quiet understanding around Neil’s fireplace, with two tumblers full of glögg, is equally important. They listen to the cheers and the voices floating to them through the firmly closed door.

Neil suddenly wants to ask Andrew what he’s doing, sitting there with Neil instead of in a corner with his family, but he can’t find the strength to find the words. Breaking the comfortable silence feels wrong, so he closes his eyes.

King is probably flying around the island, fishing for food and looping through sea stacks the way she can’t do yet with Neil. One day, maybe. If he finds a more efficient way of holding on to her. Some kind of saddle, perhaps, with straps for his feet so he doesn’t impede the movement of her wings.

Neil cracks open an eye. Andrew is a blacksmith, but he’s also skilled with leather work. Ideas start turning in Neil’s head.

“Staring,” Andrew tells him. He doesn’t seem angry about it, so Neil pushes his luck.

“You know, I can fly.”

“Your dragon can fly,” Andrew corrects. “I know that. Has your fever still not broken?”

Neil ignores the question. He’s pretty sure he’s still sick, but the possibilities he’s considering sweep that concern aside. “You could come with us, if you want.”

Andrew’s cup stops halfway to his mouth. “No,” he says.

“King won’t react badly to you,” Neil says.

He thinks about the way she stared at Kevin, how agitated she was by the fact that they didn’t come down to see her. She’d probably take well to Andrew, when he’s not trying to surprise them.

“I don’t care.”

“I can be there the whole time,” Neil insists. “Kevin has never approached her so closely. You really aren’t interested?”

“Do not,” Andrew says slowly, “make me fly.”

Neil mulls over the answer. “Are you scared of heights?” he asks.

Andrew doesn’t reply. He glances at Neil from the corner of his eye, taking a long drag of his drink.

“Huh,” Neil says. “Well, suit yourself. The invitation stands.”

“I hate you,” Andrew says casually.

The lack of heat in his voice makes Neil smile. He hides it in his tumbler, just so Andrew doesn’t see it. It feels secretive, the way Neil knows that Andrew doesn’t mean the words like that. It warms Neil inside, more than the fire or the glögg, the same way King’s warm breath always pierces through his layers.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed, please don't hesitate to leave a comment. You can find and reblog the fic here @[jsteneil](https://jsteneil.tumblr.com/post/189721899996/burning-the-skies) on tumblr.


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